iOS 8 woes continue with Bluetooth problems

iPhone owners complain about connectivity issues, especially in cars

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Apple's mobile operating system iOS 8 may be having problems connecting to certain Bluetooth devices, especially in-car gadgets such as stereos and navigation systems.

Users of iOS 8, which comes preinstalled on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus and can be installed on older Apple devices such as the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, have been taking to forums and social media to vent their frustration over problems connecting to devices via Bluetooth.

Jades, a member of the MacRumours forum, described the problem. "Connected my iPhone 6 to Lexus Bluetooth. Works for Bluetooth music but no Bluetooth phone calls. Phone indicates it's connected and sending audio to the car but absolutely nothing."

Not long after the first post another member provided their tale of woe, indicating that the problem might be more widespread than simply affecting the new iPhone devices. "Happened to me with iOS 8 on a 5S... just had to restart my phone and it started working."

Across the internet other Apple owners piped up, many pointing out that there are a range of issues involving Bluetooth. Along with issues pairing devices, there have also been reports of problems playing audio over speakers, as well as devices being unable to automatically pause the car's music when a call comes in.

Temporary solution

The problems have been reported for both iOS 8 and its recent update iOS 8.0.2, and is not just affecting Bluetooth-enabled card, with issues being reported for headphones, speakers and more.

According to Cal Bryant (@oddsocket) on Twitter "Bluetooth is a *mess* on iOS 8 - ending a call on a headset can cause sound to fail until BT is toggled [on and off], BT keyboard misbehaves too."

Some people have found that a temporary fix for the problem is to log out of iCloud, forget all connected Bluetooth devices, resetting all settings, then restarting their iPhone, repairing via Bluetooth and logging back into iCloud.

This solution is far from ideal, however, as not only is it fiddly and time consuming, but yet another bug in iOS 8 seems to affect the Reset All Settings Option, causing iCloud to lose certain documents.

These further bugs further blight an inauspicious start of iOS 8, with Apple already having to hurriedly release an update to fix earlier problems with the operating system.

A future update, iOS 8.1, is already in the hands of app developers, and apparently fixes the Bluetooth problems, though we're not sure when it will be made available for everyone.